Evan X. Merz

When I was teaching at UCSC and SJSU, I taught very large courses, often consisting of over 200 students. Courses that size create lots of infrastructural problems. Communication is a huge problem, but that's mostly taken care of by Canvas or Blackboard. The bigger problem for me was assessments.

I think that even well-written multiple choice quizzes are not great assessments. In multiple choice quizzes, students always have the answer presented to them. Even very difficult multiple choice quizzes never ask students to explain their reasoning. They never force students to come up with a concept from memory. They present students with the false premise that knowledge is fixed, and is simply a matter of choosing from what already exists.

So I always wanted to use other types of questions, and I did. Or at least I tried to. To incorporate even one short answer question meant hours of grading. I once did a single essay assignment for a large class, and probably spent over forty hours grading essays.

I needed a grading tool that could quickly save me time, while allowing me to diversify the types of assessments I could use on a week-to-week basis. For the past three months I've been building a website that automatically grades short answer, essay, and multiple choice questions. I call it QuizMana.com, and it's accepting applicants for the closed beta right now.

The hook of the website is automatic grading, but the purpose of it is to save teachers as much time as possible. So the grader gives a score for every question, but the site then points the teacher to all the "low confidence" scores. These are the scores where the grader didn't have enough information to be fully confident it gave an accurate score. The teacher can then grade the low confidence responses on a single page, and then they are done!

So the grader is part of a larger process that means that teachers only grade the work that actually needs their attention.

I think this can be a great tool, and I think it will save teachers a lot of time. If you're teaching a large class this semester, then give yourself a new tool, and try QuizMana.